Everyone envies what they do not possess. On the Continent cafés are sometimes decorated with pictures of palms and luxuriant tropical vegetation, in order to give people of the frozen North an illusion of warmth.
In steaming Asuncion, on the other hand, the fashionable café was named, "The North Pole." Here an imaginative Italian artist with a deficient sense of perspective and curious ideas of colour had decorated the walls with pictures of icebergs, snow, and Polar bears, thus affording the inhabitants of this stew-pan of a town a delicious sense of arctic coolness. The "North Pole" was the only place in Paraguay where ice and iced drinks were to be procured.
Being the height of the summer, the heat was almost unbearable, and bathing in the river was risky on account of those hateful biting-fish. There was a spot two miles away, however, where a stream had been brought to the edge of the cliff overhanging the river, down which it dropped in a feathery cascade, forming a large pool below it. Howard and I rode out every morning there to bathe and luxuriate in the cool water. The river made a great bend here, forming a bay half a mile wide. This bay was literally choked with Victoria regia, the giant water-lily, with leaves as big as tea-trays, and great pink flowers the size of cabbages. The lilies were in full bloom then, quite half a mile of them, and they were really a splendid sight. I seem somehow in this description of the Victoria regia to have been plagiarising the immortal Mrs. O'Dowd, of "Vanity Fair," in her account of the glories of the hot-houses at her "fawther's" seat of Glenmalony.
Few people now remember a fascinating book of the "'eighties," "The Cruise of the Falcon," recounting how six amateurs sailed a twenty-ton yacht from Southampton to Asuncion in Paraguay. Three of her crew got so bitten with Paraguay that they determined to remain there. We met one of these adventurers by chance in Asuncion, Captain Jardine, late of the P. and O. service, an elderly man. He invited us to visit them at Patiño Cué, the place where they had settled down, some twenty-five miles from the capital, though he warned us that we should find things extremely rough there, and that there was not one single stick of furniture in the house. He asked us to bring out our own hammocks and blankets, as well as our guns and saddles, the saddle being in my time an invariable item of a traveller's baggage.
Dick and I accordingly bought grass-plaited hammocks and blankets, and started two days later, "humping our swags," as the Australian picturesquely expressed the act of carrying our own possessions. That colour-loving youth had donned a different blazer, probably that of the "Coolgardie Cockatoos." It would have put Joseph's coat of many colours completely in the shade any day of the week, and attracted a great deal of flattering attention.
The ambitious Lopez had insisted on having a railway in his State, to show how progressive he was, so a railway was built. It ran sixty miles from Asuncion to nowhere in particular, and no one ever wanted to travel by it; still it was unquestionably a railway. To give a finishing touch to this, Lopez had constructed a railway station big enough to accommodate the traffic of Paddington. It was, of course, not finished, but was quite large enough for its one train a day. The completed portion was imposing with columns and statues, the rest tailed off to nothing. Here, to our amazement, we found a train composed of English rolling-stock, with an ancient engine built in Manchester, and, more wonderful to say, with an Englishman as engine-driver. The engine not having been designed for burning wood, the fire-box was too small, and the driver found it difficult to keep up steam with wood, as we found out during our journey. We travelled in a real English first-class carriage of immense antiquity, blue cloth and all. So decrepit was it that when the speed of the train exceeded five miles an hour (which was but seldom) the roof and sides parted company, and gaped inches apart. We seldom got up the gradients at the first or second try, but of course allowances must be made for a Paraguayan railway. Lopez had built Patiño Cué, for which we were bound, as a country-house for himself. He had not, of course, finished it, but had insisted on his new railway running within a quarter of a mile of his house, which we found very convenient.
I could never have imagined such a curious establishment as the one at Patiño Cué. The large stone house, for which Jardine paid the huge rent of £5 per annum, was tumbling to ruin. Three rooms only were fairly water-tight, but these had gaping holes in their roofs and sides, and the window frames had long since been removed. The fittings consisted of a few enamelled iron plates and mugs, and of one tin basin. Packing cases served as seats and tables, and hammocks were slung on hooks. Captain Jardine did all the cooking and ran the establishment; his two companions (Howard and I, for convenience's sake, simply termed them "the wasters") lay smoking in their hammocks all day, and did nothing whatever. I may add that "the wasters" supplied the whole financial backing. Jardine wore native dress, with bare legs and sandals, a poncho round his waist, and another over his shoulders. A poncho is merely a fringed brown blanket with hole cut in it for the head to pass through. With his long grey beard streaming over his flowing garments, Jardine looked like a neutral-tinted saint in a stained-glass window. It must be a matter for congratulation that, owing to the very circumstances of the case, saints in stained-glass windows are seldom called on to take violent exercise, otherwise their voluminous draperies would infallibly all fall off at the second step. Jardine was a highly educated and an interesting man, with a love for books on metaphysics and other abstruse subjects. He carried a large library about with him, all of which lay in untidy heaps on the floor. He was unquestionably more than a little eccentric. The "wasters" did not count in any way, unless cheques had to be written. The other members of the establishment were an old Indian woman who smoked perpetual cigars, and her grandson, a boy known as Lazarus, from a physical defect which he shared with a Biblical personage, on the testimony of the latter's sisters—you could have run a drag with that boy.
The settlers had started as ranchers; but the "wasters" had allowed the cattle to break loose and scatter all over the country. They had been too lazy to collect them, or to repair the broken fences, so just lay in their hammocks and smoked. There were some fifty acres of orange groves behind the house. The energetic Jardine had fenced these in, and, having bought a number of pigs, turned pork butcher. There was an abundance of fallen fruit for these pigs to fatten on, and Jardine had built a smoke-house, where he cured his orange-fed pork, and smoked it with lemon wood. His bacon and hams were super-excellent, and fetched good prices in Asuncion, where they were establishing quite a reputation.
Meanwhile, the "wasters" lay in their hammocks in the verandah and smoked. Jardine told me that one of them had not undressed or changed his clothes for six weeks, as it was far too much trouble. Judging from his appearance, he had not made use of soap and water either during that period.
Dick Howard proved a real "handy man." In two days this lengthy, lean, sunburnt youth had rounded up and driven home the scattered cattle, and then set to work to mend and repair all the broken fences. He caught the horses daily, and milked the cows, an art I was never able myself to acquire, and made tea for himself in a "billy."